Lo and Behold. I understood the implication of the title only because Brian pointed it out to me when I watched Werner Herzog’s film the second time: Lo and Behold! was what the three wise man uttered in awe when they saw baby Jesus. Harper Collins online dictionary is a bit more precise: lo and behold or simply lo is used to emphasize a surprising event that is about to be mentioned, or to emphasize in a humorous way that something is not surprising at all.
 
Leonard Kleinrock, one of the internet pioneers who sent the first message from UCLA to Stanford explains to Herzog that it was intended to type log into the UCLA interface as in log in, but the connection broke down after the second letter was transmitted, resulting in an enigmatic or accidental lo. It is only from this perspective that the film can be understood in its entire depth which over and again touches on questions of religion, spirituality and consciousness.
 
The room from where the first message was sent at UCLA on the evening of October 29, 1969, is described by Kleinrock as a sacred place, a temple of divine history and as a shrine of immaculate birth. Herzog seems to explore for the next 90 minutes if this God born under the auspices of a few wise man at two ivory league North American universities is what theologians call the second coming or a wicked manifestation of the anti-Christ; and by doing so, he reflects on what a significant number of cutting edge technology thinkers crunch their minds on in recent years.  The internet, precursor, enabler and embodiment of cyber physical systems is the Alpha of an Omega which a few welcome, but many fear: singularity.

Herzog doesn’t linger though for too long with the future scenarios of this historical moment. He turns his attention swiftly to the real world impact of an invention which people like Kleinrock say is only comparable to fire or electricity. Autonomous driving is such a beneficial technology which could solve many present day challenges like environmental pollution, scarcity of urban space or the annual toll of traffic casualties. Sebastian Thrun, pioneer of autonomous driving and founder of Udacity tells Herzog that his dream is to give people a chance by facilitating better access to education. He thinks that as machines become smarter, people want to become smarter. People want to make a contribution, but it’s harder and harder to make a contribution today and it’s going to be even harder in the future. He thinks that free online education is the way forward. 160.000 students attended in 2012 Thrun’s first online class which blazed the trail for so called MOOCs, massive open online courses. They seem to reflect not only a thirst for education but also the Udacity founder’s fear of being overrun by AI and becoming obsolete.

It’s a tiny bit irrational that an expert in machine learning argues that people need to learn more in order to compete with machines. It probably does also reflect that most people including those who are at the very frontline of technological development think of AI being directed at replacing human beings instead of perceiving machines in general and algorithms in particular as extensions of human performance and means to only one end: make life better.
 
If Peter Joseph, the director of the Zeitgeist trilogy, says somewhat in line with Thrun’s vision that human employment is in direct competition with automation, then George Bernhard Shaw would probably answer to both of them: The biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place. Why? Let’s think exponential technological change to the very end and assume that technology is per se evil or that it is the evil in man which turns the creation against its creator. There won’t be any competition. There will be only extermination and no attempt at teaching humans more and making them capable of learning faster will be of avail. What we need is less intelligence and more wisdom.

Idealist Freeman Dyson perceived technology as a gift of the Gods, which plays a quite similar role as hope in the Greek myth of Pandora’s Box. Technology like hope has the power to pull humanity out of its misery and drama of poverty, hunger and disease. It is the heaven sent instrument to lift our species to the next level of a never-ending game of wars, destruction and calamities. Dyson represents the exuberant spirit of ingenious minds who have observed in their own physical vessel how ideas turn into solutions.
 
Realist philosopher Martin Heidegger emphasized the ambiguity of technology in his 1954 treatise The Question Concerning Technology. While Dyson’s definition of technology would be labelled by Heidegger as bringing-forth, most of modern technology, including many of the applications of the internet are a challenging-forth, i.e. the (ab)use of technology by corporate or government power structures. Heidegger describes this threat with the term enframing and means thereby the subjection of technology to means which do serve a man controlled end.
 
The brutal destruction of WWII influenced Heidegger like many other of his contemporaries. Aldous Huxley e.g. wrote in 1957 On the Politics of Ecology, where he describes that the science-technology-power complex enframes our human societies. Both men are part of a set of tarot cards created by artist Suzanne Treister which decorates since five years as magnified prints our dining room. The devil in this set of cards is the control society, a society which philosopher Sir Karl Popper described as tyranny and which he juxtaposed to democracy. Treister doesn’t seem to agree with Popper and thinks of the internet as the continuation of the two world wars, which turns democracies into tyrannies. Enframed technology brings nothing forth, it only challenges-forth. 

We have to acknowledge that much of modern technology enframes our behavior and controls our lives to such an extent that we even neglect the well-being of our body. Herzog shows gaming addiction as a prominent example. A psychologist in an US rehab center for internet addiction describes the epidemic dimensions with cases of Chinese and South Korean adolescents dying of thrombosis after gaming 40-60 hours without break. But we also know from ashamed designers who left their well paid jobs at Facebook & Co. because they don’t want to partake in the orchestrated enslavement of humanity through technology. Are we creating a dystopian society which despite delivering all the affluence and pleasures one could think of is tyrannical in its essence? Do we witness a conflation of Huxley’s Brave New World and Blair’s 1984? Or is the internet indeed the Lord’s second coming?
 
Herzog dedicates the last section of his film to a rather cryptic question which he asks not only Musk but also scientists in various disciplines: Does the internet dream of itself? He implies that the internet has already started to develop self-awareness on its way to become an almighty superintelligence. Are those dreams subject to the Law of Large Numbers as computer scientist Kleinrock explains in the beginning of the documentary? A large number of unpredictable players or messengers collectively behave in a very predictable fashion, a fashion which we can write down exactly and we therefore can predict the performance of a network when its large. Does the internet dream the sum of what most of us dream or is it detached from humanity and dreams on its own? And is the role of the human being one that can be substituted by artificial intelligence or is ours essentially to dream up the future, while algorithms will make it happen?
 
The author of The Neverending Story, Michael Ende, envisioned in the still early years of television, the first screen which our species got hooked on, a world with children who lose their ability to dream, because they stop reading books. It is this collective loss which translates in the story into a spreading darkness devouring Fantasia, the land of dreams with all its fantastic creatures. Does the internet indeed destroy our dreams? I wouldn’t know. Technology writer Nicolas Carr and many others like educator and culture critic Neil Postman before him are convinced that we lose our ability to think deeply and critically and thus become shallow human beings; too shallow to be able to pursue truth.
 
It is as if badly designed technological progress engulfs our minds and spirits with a coat of smudge. It is as if technology brings about a renaissance of the dark medieval ages. Then it was the ideological control which in particular the Holy Roman Church and Fareast Asian Confucianism wielded over human thinking. Now it is the technological control which almighty corporations and regimes exert over their customers and subjects. Both limit man’s ability to connect with the spiritual realm. The church confined man to the scholastic interpretation of existing information. The Lords of the internet confine man to regurgitate the noise of its echo chambers.
 
In the Internet age, Henry Kissinger writes, world order has often been equated with the proposition that if people have the ability to freely know and exchange the world’s information, the natural human drive toward freedom will take root and fulfill itself, and history will run on autopilot, as it were. But philosophers and poets have long separated the mind’s purview into three components: information, knowledge, and wisdom.
 
The Internet focuses on the realm of information, whose spread it facilitates exponentially. Ever more complex functions are devised, particularly capable of responding to questions of fact, which are not themselves altered by the passage of time. Search engines are able to handle increasing speed. Yet a surfeit of information may paradoxically inhibit the acquisition of knowledge and push wisdom even further away than it was before. Communication technology threatens to diminish the individual’s capacity for an inward quest by increasing his reliance on technology as a facilitator and mediator of thought. The poet T. S. Eliot captured this in his “Choruses from ‘The Rock’”:
 
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

Heidegger understood the bringing-forth quality of technology as the revelation of truth and meant thereby the materialization of a spiritual essence. If man’s spiritual essence is communicated through his dreams, then there is a good chance that Herzog’s question is of more importance than it seems. In a world which will increasingly see machines executing tasks in the material world, it might well be that being inspired by dreams about a peaceful, fair, healthy and affluent future is the most central of all human activities. If we need to rethink education in this era of exponential change, we are therefore well advised to teach our children the art of dreaming and a set of values which empowers them to sketch up a world which is better for all not just for a few.
 
How do we learn to dream? How to we learn to take care of each other? Certainly not by spending long hours playing video games. Certainly not by being tied into an internet consumption matrix. We need to find means and ways to reconnect with each other and the planet. Neurologist Allan Schore has written extensively on right hemisphere interactions between child and caretaker and their importance for psychopathology, and there is growing evidence that attachment and failures in attachment between mother and child affect autonomic, neurochemical, and hormonal functions in a growing brain. Neurologist Mirella Dapretto describes the necessity of strong caretake and child relationships in a similar way: Typically developing children can rely on a right hemisphere mirroring neural mechanism – interfacing with the limbic system via the insula – whereby the meaning of the imitated (or observed) emotion is directly felt and hence understood.
 
The neurological effects of disrupted early childhood relationships as explained by Schore and Daretto have serious implications for increasingly individualized societies: they condition us for adult life and define how our societies work at large. We do not only grow up in family systems which have shrunk from transgenerational to nuclear entities, i.e. from ten and more people to three or only a single parent with a child; we have moreover completely changed the way we interact with each other compared to only a generation ago. Siri Hustvedt wrote in one of her essays that philosopher Martin Buber was right when he said that psychological illnesses do grow up in between people. I agree with her.

Further Reading:

• Martin Heidegger: The Question Concerning Technology
• Aldous Huxley: The Politics of Ecology
• Lukas Makuch explaining machine learning, deep learning and AI
• Will Schroder on How to remember everything you learn
• Nicolas Carr about his book The Shallows
• The Tech Insiders Who Fear a Smartphone Dystopia
• Inside the Rehab Saving Young Men from their Internet Addiction
• As Addictive as Gardening: How dangerous is video gaming?
• Irresistible: Why you are addicted to technology and how to set yourself free by Adam Alter
  
• Allan Schore, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994)
• Mirella Depretto et al., Understanding Emotions in Others: Mirror Neuron Dysfunction in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (Nature Neuroscience, 2006: 28-30)

Wim Wenders was recently called by a friend of mine a “hero of beauty.” Since the 2014 documentary The Salt of the Earth, the biography of Brazilian-French economist and photographer Sebastiao Salgado, I agree with this title. But also earlier works like Buena Vista Social Club or Wings of Desire have earned him a place in the Olympus of filmmakers. Contrary to the second great German born director Werner Herzog, Wenders does not focus on the cinematic elaboration of complex social issues, but on unorthodox heros; and while Herzog’s work is an expression of his second passion, i.e. writing, Wenders has essentially remained to the great pleasure of his visual audience a photographer. He doesn’t tell a story, but asks others to tell one and captures this story in breathtaking or at least memorable images.
 
So, why did he agree in 2015, when asked by the Holy Vatican to shoot a film about Pope Francis? Aren’t there more beautiful, in particular visually beautiful stories to be told? The answer comes as a revelation when I leave the cinema several times moved to tears by an old and mighty man who reigns over one of the if not the largest international organization, the Holy Roman Catholic Church, which is able to finance the stable employment of about half a million people, i.e. the global clergy consisting of but not limited to more than 5000 bishops and more than 400k priests. Pope Francis is a gentle, humble and modest man who never aspired to lead the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. His story is not one of visual beauty, but one about beauty from within, one that rests on values which this world is in dear need of.
 
Now, some might call me (like Wim Wenders) a Pope Francis fanboy. I don’t mind. There are too many people out there who cannot differentiate between the organization, i.e. the institution Church, and the single people which act in and through it. Like money or power, organizations, which have plenty of both, can be used for creation or destruction. Pope Francis might have a good PR director, but we all surely acknowledge that the flood of information which hits our brains in increasing intensity since the 1980s makes this necessary (compare what I have written earlier about cognitive psychologist Daniel Levitin and educator Neil Postman).
 
Papa Francesco is explicit about pedophilia. He condemns it. For some this is not enough. But we should remind ourselves that getting the top spot in any organization does not give the power to change it entirely. Many wished that Barak Obama could transform the US into a more social nation and were shocked with how many political measures including wars he had to and did go along. But for some Obama will be remembered as introducing general health care and they understand that a single human being cannot take care of all evils in this world in a limited lifetime or even less so in the few years of a presidential term. They will see that the focus on one top priority makes sense if one acts in general with values and principles that are in line with the well-being of all; and if this priority’s targets are met, they will call it a success.
 
Pope Francis might be remembered for his 184 page encyclical letter Laudato Si, in which he defines the protection of this planet, our common home, as his top priority. Let’s hope that he meets his targets, because his letter interestingly coincides with the increasing number of scientists appearing in public like e.g. Alice Bows-Larkin, who warn about a sixth mass extinction caused by human-made climate change. One could argue that the Pope does tune into a widely played melody (a rather cacophonic one to be sure), but he does so with interdisciplinary wisdom which I have rarely if ever seen before. He connects the environmental disaster with our social disaster and sums it all up in his three T: trabajo, tierra and techo.
 
What a world is this, he asks, where large swaths of humanity are without work (trabajo) and without land (tierra)? It is a world with a rotten roof (techo), one which is about to collapse. And he puts forward a simple Jesuit solution to this problem: let us all have a bit less and share more. A solution which makes so much sense since we witness a rise of mental health issues in rich industrialized nations (burnout, loneliness, isolation, neurosis, ADHD, etc.) while poverty struck regions on this globe still have to fight for material survival. He even goes so far as to explain drug abuse as a desire to escape from a dominant culture, from an economy which kills (una economia que mata) the planet and the people. He is explicit although he knows that many don’t want to hear this truth, in particular in countries like the US where truth has been kicked to the ground and rolled in dust and dirt. 
 
Further info:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Francis:_A_Man_of_His_Word
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/pope-francis-a-man-of-his-word-2018
http://w2.vatican.va/content/dam/francesco/pdf/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si_en.pdf

Critique of Gary Snyder’s writing feels like a sacrilege against the beauty of letters, nature and the elders. Not knowing if he deems me worthy of such relationship, he makes himself a point to assume the position of the grandfather I never had: My own grandparents certainly didn’t tell us stories around the campfire before we went to sleep. Their house had an oil furnace instead, and a small library. So the people of civilization read books. For some centuries the “library” and the “university” have been our repository of lore. In this huge old occidental culture our teaching elders are books. Books are our grandparents!
 
This book should get praise only. Like Wes Jackson, a geneticist friend of Synder writes: I have always found it difficult to imagine this century without the life and work of Gary Snyder. After reading this collection of essays, I now find it impossible. I could not agree more and would say that The Practice of the Wild is even more a mandatory read in the 21st century than it was in the 20th. Although an entire generation has been influenced by Snyder, I am surprised that he is not more widely known or at least added to the recent discussion around a Western education canon.
 
This collection of nine substantial essays is summarized by Snyder in his own words: Our immediate business, and our quarrel, is with ourselves. It would be presumptuous to think that Gaia much needs our prayers or healing vibes. Human beings themselves are at risk – not just on some survival-of-civilization level but more basically on the level of heart and soul. We are in danger of losing our souls. We are ignorant of our own nature and confused about what it means to be a human being. Much of this book has been the reimagining of what we have been and done, and the robust wisdom of our earlier ways. Like Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home – a genuine teaching text – this book has been a meditation on what it means to be human.
 
But reading them I am left with a decisive uneasiness. If such a widely travelled and learned man like Synder writes in all this erudition quite gloomily about our relationship with ourselves, others and the planet, is there any hope left? Snyder does not give an explanation why all these local cultures and many species are under threat or already extinct. He wails in beautiful prose and some poetry over the lost diversity and richness of wilderness. But he does not explain why cultures undergo these breakneck transformations. Quite on the contrary, Snyder argues that the only meaningful explanation for all the environmental devastation, murdering of fellow human beings and extermination of other species is “spiritual Darwinism.”
 
He refers to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit who claims a special evolutionary destiny under the name of higher consciousness and misinterprets his 20th century writing as a form of transhumanism: man is on a path to leave the rest of earth-bound animal and plant life behind to enter an off-the-planet realm transcending biology. He calls Chardin an anthropocentrist new age thinker and counters his teachings with the radical critique of the Deep Ecology movement.
 
It is probably not a coincidence that I read almost parallel to Gary Snyder, recommended by a dear American friend, Sadhguru’s Inner Engineering, recommended by a dear French friend. Both writers are sages. Snyder is a cosmopolite anthropologist who excels in describing how nature, sacredness and wildness interact and what it is that we have lost. Sadhguru is a yogi who has reached a special state of consciousness and shares many insights which proof his human engineering competence. But there is a qualitative difference between these two books: Snyder is modest and humble while Sadhguru appears to be patronizing and proselytizing.
 
It is though Sadhguru how reconciles Snyder and Teilhard de Chardin when he explains that there are two basic forces within you. Most people see them as being in conflict. One is the instinct of self-preservation, which compels you to build walls around yourself to protect yourself. The other is the constant desire to expand, to become boundless. These two longings – are not opposing forces, though they may seem to be. They are related to two different aspects of your life. One force helps you root yourself well on this planet; the other takes you beyond. Self-preservation needs to be limited to the physical body. If you have the necessary awareness to separate the two, there is no conflict. But if you are identified with the physical, tehn instead of working in collaboration, these two fundamental forces become a source of tension. All of the “material-versus-spiritual” struggle of humanity spring from this ignorance. When you say “spirituality,” you are talking about a dimension beyond the physical. The human desire to transcend the limitations of the physical is a completely natural one. To journey from the boundary-based individual body to the boundless source of creation – this is the very basis of the spiritual process.
 
In as such, Snyder and Teilhard de Chardin describe the same thing but from two different perspectives. One describes the journey from the physical towards the spiritual and emphasizes that there is no spirituality, no soul, without respect for the own, the other and the body of mother Earth. The other describes the omega point as a final destination of consciousness evolution and explains the turmoil in the physical world thereby. Both man are deeply rooted in the phenomenal world, one as keen observer of human culture and custom, the other as geologist and paleontologist. Both men go beyond the phenomenal world and try to understand the noumenal world; one through the multitude of native rituals, the other through the singularity of Christianity. Both got a point, but I can’t help to be reminded of Heinz von Förster’s anectode in Understanding Systems about the 15th century mathematician Nicolas of Cusa who proofed that an infinite circle is identical with a line.

Both seem to recognize that it is culture which requires a transformation. One shows us what our ancestors have done right, the other explains what we still need to learn in order to progress and evolve. Snyder writes that greed exposes the foolish person or the foolish chicken alike to the ever-watchful hawk of the food-web and to early impermanence. Preliterate hunting and gathering cultures were highly trained and lived well by virtue of keen observation and good manners; as noted earlier, stinginess was the worst of vices. Teilhard de Chardin emphasizes the force of love to drive giving instead of taking.
 
Snyder teachers us that the term culture goes back to Latin meanings, via colere, such as “worship, attend to, cultivate, respect, till, take care of.” The root kwel basically means to revolve around a center – cognate with wheel and Greek telos, “completion of a cycle,” hence teleology. In Sanskrit this is chakra, “wheel,” or “great wheel of the universe.” The modern Hindi word is charkha, “spinning wheel” – with which Gandhi meditated the freedom of India while in prison. He shows that a culture is like a giant trap, a huge flywheel. Once put in place or motion it is difficult for the individual to escape.
 
Teilhard de Chardin interprets increasing complexity as the axis of evolution (a concept which is the central pillar of modern big history) of matter into a geosphere, a biosphere, and finally into consciousness and then to supreme consciousness (the Omega Point). He explains – and that’s probably the part in his writing which Snyder dislikes – that evolution shifted from the realm of physics into chemistry from chemistry into biology, and from biology into culture. And it is in this last realm that man dominates over all other elements in this universe.
 
Synder does though agree with Chardin between the lines, because this passage shows that he has already in the late 1980s if not earlier anticipated the dawn of the Anthropocene: A culture of wilderness starts somewhere in this terrain. Civilization is part of nature – our egos play in the fields of the unconscious – history takes place in the Holocene – human culture is rooted in the primitive and the Paleolithic – our body is a vertebrate mammal being – and our souls are out in the wilderness.
 
I warmly recommend to read this book and watch in the course of doing so films like The Revenant (about nature, wildness and the sacred) and Wild (about the healing force of the wild), Into the Wild (about the deadly force of the wild and the necessity for man to be part of some sort of civilization), 127 Hours (about the attraction of the wild), Captain Fantastic (about wildness and parenting) or The Deer Hunter (about the conflation of sacred wildness and social sickness).

Filmed in 2011, this two-part documentary by veteran film-maker Jonathan Stedall tells the story of philosopher Rudolf Steiner’s remarkable life (1861-1925) and explores the influence of his ideas and insights on a whole range of contemporary activities – education, agriculture, medicine, social and financial issues, and the arts.
 
Stedall starts with a rather ontological question “Where do we come from, what are we, where are we going?” and acknowledges that the visionary Rudolf Steiner, who planted in a generally backward environment seeds for the future, has given him so far the most profound answers. Stedall follows Steiner’s biography in part one and starts at the margins of the Austrian-Hungarian empire in what is now Croatia in order to elaborate on the main stations in his transformative life: Pötschach in Lower Austria, Vienna, Weimar, Berlin and finally Dornach in Switzerland.
 
The biographical account which is also an interesting document of cultural evolution during before and after WWI in Central Europe is blended with several interviews of people who have studied and practice Steiner’s teachings. We are introduced to the basic concepts of his educational theory like “unlearning what we have learned so far” or that physical dexterity in early childhood translates to dexterity of mind and thought in late childhood and adolescence.
 
We learn that Steiner invented eurhythmy, a dance like performance art, because he realized early on that harmonious movement is in modern societies rather the exception than the rule. Eurhythmy, which can also be applied as a form of psychotherapy heals through movement by overcoming the heaviness of the earth through rhythm. An interviewed teacher explains how these natural rhythms are tied to our emotions: Laughing is breathing out, crying is  about breathing in. I recall a nature documentation which I watched last year about the pairing dance of birds, in which the speaker said: with each synchronized movement grows mutual trust confirming that there is much more about communication than words in the entire animal kingdom including us.
 
Biodynamic agriculture, a forebode of permaculture and much of what is now summarized under the umbrella term organic agriculture, was Steiner’s late brainchild. He reinstated ancient farming calendars, which observed and understood the basic principles of nature at a time when modern farming techniques are only about to take hold of the industry. Steiner understood agriculture as a process to heal the earth. He was by any means far ahead of his time and would have probably burnt at the stake during the medieval inquisition for proposing to farmers to apply strangely prepared fertilizing mixtures called 500 and 501. He conceived them as medicine for the earth.
 
We are introduced to the Camphill Movement, which was founded in England during WWII by one of Steiner’s disciples, the physician Karl König. It is based on the anthroposophical principle that all life has value and therefore establishes in contrast to the holocaust an inclusive approach to education and work. Mentally and physically handicapped are embraced and made an integral part of society. We start to suspect that it is actually us normal folks, who receive healing through vulnerability and innocence.
 
Felix Koguzki, a Viennese herbalist who transferred an overview of the traditional central European plant knowledge to his friend Steiner, is shown at the brink of WWI as a dying species: hunter & gatherer generalists who had a wide knowledge of the local ecosystem. Its amazing to realize that this knowledge started to disappear already more than a century ago and that slow science – taking five minutes to look at a plant – is something that needs to be kindled in every child in order to instill and maintain awe for the natural world. How difficult has this become in our times when the natural world competes with the dopamine addiction generates by the cyber physical space.
 
We are left in part one with the impression that Steiner was a natural scientist like his 18th century forefathers Alexander von Humboldt and Wolfgang von Goethe who was moreover blessed and cursed with a mystical perception of the spiritual world. He tried to merge science and spiritualism and recognized early on that the increasingly dualist worldview of modernist societies conditions us to disregard the wonders of the phenomenal world and the miracles which hide beyond it.

Part two zooms in on Waldorf education and biodynamic agriculture. We are being told that children need to be given time to develop properly and that education is not about imparting knowledge but about awakening and nurturing what children already know. We learn that Steiner’s meta-philosophy was one of consciousness evolution and that karma and reincarnation can make us remember the true purpose of why we are here.
 
The president of the US anthroposophical society summarizes the challenges of contemporary education systems when he says that the great crime of our time is that the intellectual adult consciousness is pressed on the child in the name of performance and academic achievement. It is a crime because we deny the innate qualities of childhood at that time. We should be alarmed, because at what he describes of the American education system is meanwhile true all around the globe: The pressure on children through testing which started during the Bush era and continued throughout the Obama era gives no space to Waldorf education and thus no space to unfold their spiritual identity.
 
I recall a scene with my eldest niece who graduated two years ago from high school in small Austrian city not far from Vienna and not at all far from where Steiner spent his youth. During the months of preparation for the high school graduation, so she told me, one of their teachers tried a disturbing method of getting her pupils motivated. Most likely influenced by the results of recent PISA tests, which put 14/15 year olds into a globalized and industrialized format of skill and competence assessment, she explained them that if they would not work hard their jobs will be taken by Chinese of the same age.

Our education systems – no matter in which country – are to a large extent the result of competing knowledge economies. A systems theory perspective reveals that this competition is translated from the regime sphere which is dominated by the modern science-technology-power complex to ministries of education, from there to municipal education bureaus, from there to school principals, from there to teachers and from them directly into our children.
 
Instead of granting our children, whom we love beyond measure, a learning environment which enables them to unfold their innate nature, we put them into system which force feed them and turn them into automatons, who in turn become unhappy adults, obedient nation state citizens and loyal consumers. Waldorf education helps children to think out of the box. Its thus no surprise that Steiner’s philosophy is in conflict with existing power structures.
 
Waldorf education deals with what the children are by instilling a sense of trust into one’s own intuition through love and a sense of trust into society at large through collaboration. Traditional education systems deal with external demands of society and instill into our children competition and fear. Rudolf Steiner’s fundamental legacy is that he saw the world as it could be and not as it was. His path was then a lonely one, but we have arrived at a crossroad which makes it necessary that we listen to his message and act upon it. For the sake of ourselves and for the sake of those whom we love most: our children.
 
Official film synopsis:
http://rudolfsteinerfilm.squarespace.com/synopsis/